Carla L. Peterson's Doers of the Word (1997), a study of African American women speakers and writers from 1830-1880, is an important addition to scholarship on nineteenth-century African American women. Its scope resembles that of Frances Smith Foster's 1993 study, but its approach is quite different. For Foster, the Black women who came to literary voice in nineteenth-century America were claiming their rights as United States citizens, denying that anything should disqualify them from full membership in an enlightened national polity. Peterson sees these same women as having been fundamentally estranged from the nation by a dominant culture unsympathetic to Black women, and by a Black intelligentsia whose male view of race concerns left little room for Black female intellect.